• 0 Posts
  • 137 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle
  • I dont think I could live like these people even if I had the money; I feel like I hate the idea of having people whos relationship is purely professional going around in my space to clean things, but trying to clean all that space by oneself without hiring people to help sounds like a lot of bother.



  • Tbf, starship isn’t finished yet, if it were pretending to be a product ready for public use and was blowing up customer’s payloads, that’d be a fair point, but if you’re developing something by just flying it knowing it will probably fail, and then fixing whatever causes the failures so that it gets farther next time, until it eventually goes all the way, then being criticized for the test flights failing isn’t really fair unless you aren’t making any progress with them, which starship seems to have been making.


  • From looking up the numbers, it seems like a soyuz launch under the cheapest circumstances can get decently cheaper than a falcon 9 launch, however, it also carries significantly less payload mass, so the actual cost per mass to orbit is lower for falcon 9, which makes the comparison a bit like comparing a van to a semi truck; if you want to move something small enough to fit in the van, without any other cargo to fill the space, then the van makes sense. But if you’re running a logistics network and have enough cargo to fill whatever vehicle you’re using, the bigger truck is going to be cheaper to use.

    As far as them being a better rocket company though, Roscosmos has just been operating a group of designs that are quite ancient in terms of rockets, especially the soyuz which is an evolution on an original design that literally predates Sputnik. They’re not bad rockets per se, but Roscosmos didn’t develop them and they don’t seem to be innovating much beyond them, and so are quickly becoming out of date as more groups work on things like rocket reusability. SpaceX by contrast has been quite innovative in the space especially with regards to reuse, and has such a high capacity that one satellite constellation it owns accounts for a majority of operational satellites at the moment.











  • The point of building nukes isn’t really to launch a nuke at someone, it’s to make others decide that attacking you is too risky. Missile defense isn’t perfect, so even if it probably would stop them, there’s still a risk one gets through, that someone would have to take into consideration before launching an attack. It’s even more a threat against Isreal, since they have less time to intercept, and even one missile getting through would destroy a comparatively larger fraction of the country, being that it’s fairly small.



  • I mean, having a hostage generally implies your intent is to hold that person captive in exchange for a demand being fulfilled, after which point you at least claim that you will release them. Presumably, Israel doesnt intend or claim that it will release those it has imprisoned even if it gets what it wants, so calling them hostages wouldnt really be accurate. One could call the people held by Hamas prisoners too I suppose, since that just implies them to be held against their will, but as they are explicitly being held in order to be used as a bargaining chip, calling them hostages adds more information about the situation than just calling them prisoners too would.


  • Youre wrong on all counts there, but most importantly to the actual topic of discussion, a negotiated settlement in which the aggressor is just given some of the territory they are attempting to conquer (which is exactly what a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia as the war has gone thus far would have been, because what else could Ukraine have possibly offered to convince Russia that it was worth it to give up their attack?) is not a wish for peace, its a wish for appeasement. It sounds like peace at first glance, sure, but by rewarding aggressive action, it gives every incentive for the aggressor to simply attack again later, in the hope of gaining more concessions. If this kind of policy led to peace, there never would have been a second world war. I do not like war the way you seem to think, but I do not want it tomorrow either. Ensuring that there is as little incentive as possible for those with the means to start them to do so, requires that those that start wars are not allowed to gain by doing so, and Russia has indisputably started this one, therefore to ensure peace, it must lose.

    It would be great if all peace took was for everyone involved to sit down and talk, but as you say, the world is not like that.